Writing update 02 June 2013

I was sent home sick on Thursday afternoon with a weird virus-thingie. Hot & cold flushes, nausea, disassociation. By Friday afternoon I was starting to feel better, so I sat down to write around 4pm. By Sunday morning, with pauses for sleeping, eating and going into London to see friends, I’d managed to write about 10,000 words.

I don’t know if it was the illness, but most of the writing revolved around two new characters in my secret project. They’re dwarfs from 10th Century Romania who develop a cocaine habit. They were a completely unplanned part of the novel, though they seem to have found a very natural place in the narrative.

They initially sprang out of a Twitter comment which caught my imagination. I played around with them in one scene, and grew rather fond of them.

This afternoon I also made a few lazy edits to my long-in-gestation Robocop fanfic. I realised, too, that it’s not very good. And though I’d originally wanted to write it quickly and with a complete pulp fiction feel to it (that’s pulp fiction as in the 1950s and 60s stuff, not the film), I’ve now fallen into a trap of wanting to improve its quality.

That’s about it writing-wise.

I finished reading The Twelve Tribes of Hattie, too, which was OK. There are a handful of good short stories in there, and a larger handful of fairly tedious ones. The book is structured in a similar fashion to my own novel, Backpackers, which is pleasing, as I had been concerned that a narrative which is loosely centred around one person, but goes into short stories about other people, wasn’t market friendly.